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Jun 30, 2014

The Leftovers: “Pilot”

By Josh Oakley

Loss leaves a crater. More than just a hole, it is the
result of an impact, whether sudden or drawn out. Shock is temporary, at least
for most, but loss is a cancerous crater. It is the grave you dig for a dog,
filled but never the same. You can plaster over loss with platitudes, religion,
alcohol. And those things can help, some of them can even heal you, restore
some sense of balance to your world. But what they can never do is return you
to person you once were. Loss changes everything, from your plans for your
future to the way your morning coffee tastes. There is a shift. No matter how
hard you push, you can never truly get back into place.

The world of The
Leftovers is defined by loss, and the grief that accompanies it. Adapted
from Tom Perrotta’s 2011 novel of the same name, the show debuts with a clear
frame of mind, one colored by darkness. On October 14th, in some
unspecified year around ours, two percent of the world’s population vanished.
We see this from the point-of-view of a mother who seems worn down by the
annoyances of a laundry mat and a screaming child. And then the screaming is
gone, and then replaced by her own. A car crashes behind her, a child wails for
his father in front. The single shot that carries her from the driver’s seat to
the empty carrier that mere seconds ago held her baby is short but unrelenting.
This is panic in its purest form. This is the worst nightmare of a mother
brought cruelly to life.

Voices fill the black screen and the words “Three Years
Later” appear. The brilliance, for both the book and show, in jumping to a near
future is that it shows how the world is after everything has festered. The
initial scare is gone, even the years ruled mainly by questions. The curious
are still present, but the how and the why no longer hold the allure of the
simple “what” itself. Lives have been ruined, and an answer as to the cause would
hardly help at all.

The signs of memorial are all around. After the time
transition, the camera is focused on a blue ribbon adorning a street lamp.
Kevin (Justin Theroux) runs through the town, emptier than it should be. In the
place of any other early risers, there are tokens littered throughout, memories
manifested into stuffed animals. Kevin encounters a dog and calls for it. The
dog never makes it to him, taken down by a bullet instead. The man who killed
the dog, a stranger to Kevin, drives off. This is the world of The Leftovers. This is a mission
statement, an alarm to viewers that the world is off-balance, and tragedy has forever
altered the survivors.

Kevin is the police chief of Mapleton, a small town in New
York City. His main concerns, as they stand in most of the premiere, are for his
daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley), his son Tom (Chris Zylka), and the upcoming
Heroes Day parade, a memorial for those who disappeared. The last of those is a
fear driven by the Guilty Remnant (G.R.), a religious group who believe, as
their own posters say, “We Are Living Reminders”. They dress in white, smoke
cigarettes (not for pleasure, but for penance) and go out in pairs to follow
regular people around. They act as shadows, looking to cultivate members and stop
the blindness they see in those around them. They’ve crashed events before, and
Kevin worries the parade could turn into a disaster.

Much of the episode anticipates this, building the world of
show before collapsing it. Jill is a high school student (I’m not sure if the
show said her age, but in the book she was 17), hollowed by the loss of her
mother to the G.R. She rebels in common ways, with drugs and parties, but
pivots away at the last second. The party she attends is one of the only real
sparks of color in the episode, giving a frenzied energy to the proceedings.
This is as much a cult as the G.R. in some respects; a way for a group of
people to collectively deal with the grief surrounding them. The sexualized
“Spin the Bottle” app that sends Jill to a room with an understanding but
nevertheless horny boy exemplifies the party perfectly: bright lights, harsh
sounds, and a randomness attuned to the minds of those who consider themselves
lost already. Jill finds better company in the Frost brothers, Adam (Max
Carver) and Scott (Charlie Carver). The three discover the dead dog, which
Kevin has stuffed in his truck, and bury it. ”They’re not like us, trying to
reason it all out, make sense of shit that makes no sense,” one of the brothers
says of the animal, “You just go primal man. Same thing’s going to happen to
us, it just takes longer.” The beasts have gone mad, a theme that will recur
throughout the episode, and all humans can do is keep them at bay. But what to
do when the poison has had its way with our minds as well?

There is an explosion at the parade, just as Kevin feared,
as the G.R. shows up in the middle of a speech by a woman who lost her husband
and two kids on October 14th, Nora (Carrie Coon). As Mayor Lucy
Warburton (Amanda Warren) puts it in a meeting the day before the parade, “She
lost her entire family, she’ll say whatever the fuck she wants.” And she does,
telling a heartbreaking story of how much she longs for the worst day of her
life, before the disappearance, back. Better to be sick with the family than
healthy alone. Then, the G.R. descend, and hold up letters to form: “Stop
Wasting Your Breath!” The crowd is enraged, and a brawl ensues. Director Peter
Berg is familiar with action on both the big screen (Lone Survivor) and small (Friday
Night Lights). He collapses the fighting here, keeping everything in a
close-up that chops the event into chaos. Our main characters are only given as
much importance in this sequence as everyone else. There is no order, at least
not in a sustainable sense. The primal is beginning to overtake the reason.

Kevin understands the way of the animal better than most,
even finding it impossible to reign in. He attempts to pull his gun on the man
who shot the dog, but is too drunk to seem like a convincing threat. “You
cannot kill our fucking dogs,” he screams. Later, watching those same creatures
tear a deer limb from limb, the man replies: “They are not our dogs… Not
anymore.”The episode ends with its
protagonist shooting a horde of what used to be family pets, an event only
slightly less cruel for happening off-screen. The Leftovers doesn’t do this to prove its pay-cable bonafides, but
to make a terrifying point: grief changes some so much that they become
unrecognizable. Of course, Kevin has just been reminded of this, going to the
G.R. and pleading with his wife to come home. Both of them have been altered
dramatically: she weeps but does not reply or follow, he beats up a man only
hours after trying to stop those who were doing the same.

Laurie (Amy Brenneman) is first seen as one in a row of
sleeping women, all dressed in white. The sun bathes her through a window as
she sits up, smoking. Her breakfast is mushy oatmeal from a communal pot, her
morning disturbed by her name not mentioned on an assignment list. There is a
clear order to things, and those in the G.R. appear to be consumed by the
discrepancy between the current and the past. They put on intentional faces for
those they follow in the town, but spend much of their time alone frowning,
disturbed by the shape of the world. Brenneman, unable to use her voice, has
the most difficult job of the central cast, and ably delivers in this episode.
The pain at her husband’s arrival, the small joy of a new recruit (Meg, played
by Liv Tyler) just moments later, the combination of banality and comfort that
the G.R. provides are all accessed fully by her expressions. This show would
not work if Laurie was incomprehensible, and Brenneman brings a powerful force
to even her smallest actions.

So three of the pieces of the Garvey clan – Kevin, Jill and
Laurie – are all in the same town, but broken apart. Jill and her father eat
dinner together, but the former is disengaged and the latter only comforted by
his daughter’s friend, Aimee (Emily Meade). The last member of what once was a
family is far off, a member of a cult, ignoring his fathers’ calls. The role is
perfectly cast; Zylka looks exactly like the all-state, friendly frat college
boy Tom was supposed to be. Instead, life intervened, and he finds himself a
follower of Wayne (Paterson Joseph), a man who claims to heal the broken and
seemingly can. That proof comes in the form of a Congressman (Brad Leland, from
Berg’s old show) who becomes unburdened in his presence. Yet there are warning
signs, from Wayne’s knife-wielding threat to the population of young Asian
women that sit pool-side at the leader’s house.

One of those women, Christine (Annie Q.) has a special bond
with Tom, who brings her gummy worms. This is one of the few warm, gentle
moments that the episode offers, but even it is treacherous. This, then, is the
thing that holds Tom in the same universe as the other Garveys. Danger is
all-encompassing, ravaging the sane and confounding the mental. Telling the two
groups apart can be impossible, and the inability to do so is more threatening
than any vague hint of god. Religion, drugs and sex are methods, but humanity
lurks under all of them, waiting for its moment to pounce and tear any good
thing to bits. The story that Wayne tells Tom, tears in his eyes, concerns a
vision of his lost son. He has been commanded to awaken the rest of mankind,
he claims to his follower, to prove what this new world is. But the world is
unknowable. And the truth about grief is this: you cannot be shaken from it.
The best you can hope for is finding a more comfortable position to sleep in.

Grade: A-

Miscellaneous:

The flashbacks are an interesting, brief element of the
episode, though one that is likely to return. I especially like how Laurie and
Kevin’s recollections are edited to be a nightmare-ish rush, but Tom’s is slow,
quiet until impact.

A lot has been said about Damon Lindelof, who does an excellent
job adapting the book here with Perrotta himself, doing another “mystery” show.
But if you haven’t read the book or the interviews, you should know that
answers are maybe the least important element of this journey. That’s not me
telling you how to watch, just warning those who may have expectations that
probably won’t bear fruit.

I’ll talk more about the book in a spoiler section below,
but something that’s fine to say to anyone: the Wayne stuff was probably my
least favorite material in the book. I don’t know if it will be any better as a
whole here, but Joseph’s performance during that speech certainly seems to hint
so. He gives a gravitas I never truly bought in the novel.

One more thing about the book-to-show changes: Making Kevin
the chief of police was smart, giving him the chance to interact with the town
in a more involved way than as mayor, and it helps that the mayor we do get
here is already so well drawn.

There’s not a lot of levity here, but enough for the time
being; that’s important for a show like this so as to not become comically
overburdened. It seems like the Frost brothers will play a bigger part in the
show than the novel, which seems like a good call; both actors sell the line
between childish and dumb well. And speaking of levity:

“I get the pope, but Gary fucking Busey?”

BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD

One of the main tricky things will be handling the Kevin/Aimee
and Tom/Christine relationships onscreen. They never do anything physical in
the book, but even hinting at that visually will come across harsher than on
page (not that it’s ok in any sense,
but there’s an obvious difference in seeing it). They certainly seem to be
hinting that both of those will make their way to the show.

The one bad thing about the Frost brothers being in play
this early is that we won’t get that same, gorgeously simple ending for Jill.

1 comment:

I'm a gigantic fan of Tom Perrotta, and I was thrilled while reading this book. In THE LEFTOVERS, Perrotta continues his great observational writing of suburban angst and middle class family dynamics, but he also overlays it with a remarkable story of a present-day rapture. This is a writer pushing himself, while remaining true to everything we've come to love about him. Hugely recommended.